the cartoon wars heat up...
Washington Post
February 8, 2006
Pg. 15

Protests Spread In Afghanistan

At Least 3 Killed During Clash in North Over Depictions of Muhammad

By Griff Witte, Washington Post Foreign Service

KABUL, Afghanistan, Feb. 7 -- Violent protests spread Tuesday across Afghanistan, where at least three demonstrators died in a clash with NATO soldiers and hundreds rampaged through the capital, trashing U.N. vehicles and throwing stones at buildings used by international agencies, visitors and troops.

Tens of thousands of Muslims demonstrated in parts of the Middle East, Africa and Asia, continuing to vent their rage over European newspaper cartoons mocking the prophet Muhammad. Some Muslim clerics and governments called for calm, while others seemed to encourage the vengeful outpouring.

In Tehran, crowds attacked the Danish Embassy with gasoline bombs and stones for a second day, while Iran's best-selling newspaper launched a competition to find the best cartoon about the Holocaust. Iran's government said the European cartoons had unleashed an "Islamophobic current which will be answered."

The European Union demanded increased security for European citizens and facilities in a number of countries where anti-Western violence has broken out in the past several days, and Denmark urged its citizens to leave Indonesia. Danish flags were burned in several cities Tuesday, and several consulates were attacked Monday.

A large Indonesian group, the Islamic Defenders Front, said that more protests were planned for Wednesday and that the issue had unified the country's Muslims. But both President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and the chairmen of the two largest Muslim civic groups appealed for calm. Din Syamsuddin, chairman of one group, said that the anger was natural but that the "violence is against Islam."

In Denmark, where the cartoons were first published, Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen appealed for "calm steadiness" and dialogue with Muslim countries. He called the controversy "a growing global crisis that has the potential to escalate beyond the control of governments."

"I want to appeal and reach out to all people and countries in the Muslim world," Rasmussen said, stressing Denmark's long support of "freedom of religion" and its record as "one of the world's most tolerant and open societies." He said, "Let us work together in the spirit of mutual respect and tolerance."

Rasmussen, speaking directly to the public for the first time since attackers began torching Danish diplomatic missions in various countries, blamed the violence on "radicals, extremists and fanatics" and said the vast majority of Denmark's 200,000 Muslims did not support the protesters.

He repeated that while he was sorry Muslims had been offended, he could not apologize for a Danish newspaper exercising its right to free speech. He said he had been surprised by how quickly "lies and misinformation" about the Danish situation had spread around the world via cell phones, text messages and Web blogs.

The Iranian daily paper Hamshahri said its cartoon contest was designed to test the boundaries of free speech -- the reason given by many European newspapers for publishing the cartoons that mocked Islam's holiest figure.

"Does Western free speech allow working on issues like America and Israel's crimes, or an incident like the Holocaust, or is this freedom of speech only good for insulting the holy values of divine religions?" the paper asked. In some European countries, it is a crime to deny that the Holocaust happened.

In London, British news media reported that Omar Khayam, 22, who had caused controversy when he dressed as a suicide bomber during a weekend protest, was arrested for violating parole in a drug case.

In Pakistan, thousands of demonstrators marched in the northwest city of Peshawar, burning effigies of Rasmussen and chanting, "Hang the man who insulted the prophet." The rally was led by the entire provincial cabinet. The chief minister, Akram Khan Durrani, said that the cartoonists should be punished "like terrorists" and that "it is our official and religious duty to register our outrage against this blasphemous act."

In Afghanistan, the fresh protests and fatalities came on the same day that a suicide bomber detonated his explosives outside police headquarters in the southern city of Kandahar, killing at least 12 and wounding 14. The Taliban Islamic militia asserted responsibility for the bombing, which was one of a spate of recent suicide attacks in the south and did not appear related to the demonstrations.

The most confrontational protest Tuesday occurred in the northern Afghan city of Meymaneh, where protesters threw stones and grenades at a NATO compound that primarily houses Norwegian soldiers doing reconstruction work. That protest and several others occurred in regions not usually associated with religious extremism or violence.

At least three protesters were killed in the Meymaneh clash, but it was unclear how they died. A NATO spokesman said that they had been killed by a grenade thrown by a fellow protester and that "at no stage have NATO forces used lethal force." But there were other reports that NATO troops had fired into the crowd.

The spokesman said a crowd of about 300 gathered outside the compound and gradually became more hostile, throwing stones and trying to get inside. He said troops responded with tear gas and warning shots, but the crowd torched nearby vehicles and buildings, fired shots and threw grenades.

Afghan officials said the situation remained tense, and British troops were being rushed to Meymaneh to help restore order. International military spokesmen said that Afghan police had helped their forces patrol and secure the area and that the protests were not related to the performance of Norwegian troops.

"This was a manifestation of a phenomenon that is taking place beyond Afghanistan as well," a spokesman said. The Afghan deputy provincial governor, Sayed Ahmed Sayed, said the protest began after a local religious council met and condemned the Danish cartoons.

Large protests also took place in the far western city of Herat, where 8,000 people marched in the streets, and in the northern city of Pol-e Khomri. There were also reports of protests in half a dozen other towns, with swelling crowds and sporadic stone-throwing but no serious injuries or deaths.

But violent demonstrations erupted in Kabul, where a small, angry mob grew quickly and as many as 1,000 men marched through the streets in search of Western targets to attack. During a rampage that lasted several hours, protesters trashed U.N. vehicles and threw stones at U.N. buildings, the U.S. Embassy compound, a NATO headquarters and private homes in a neighborhood popular among Westerners.

The protesters tried to gain access to several heavily fortified compounds -- including the U.S. military base -- but were pushed back by security forces. They shouted slogans such as "Down with the USA!" "Down with Bush!" "Down with the Jews!" "Down with the Christians!" and "Long live Islam!"

At one point, Afghan soldiers fired warning shots into the air. No one was killed, but several security officers were injured by rocks and numerous protesters were hurt when the police began beating them. At least 15 people were arrested.

Mohammed Rahim Seddiq, 23, a baker who described himself as a protest organizer and who was later arrested, said it was "the duty of every Muslim" to protest against the United States and Denmark. "We want to teach a lesson to the infidels that they should not repeat this," he said.

A U.S. military spokesman, Lt. Col. Jerry O'Hara, said U.S. military officials had sent representatives to speak with Afghan leaders in the aftermath of a rally Monday in which protesters tried to force their way onto the American military base in Bagram, north of the capital. Three protesters were killed when Afghan security forces opened fire.

"Our message was that they should judge us on what we're doing here, not on what some cartoonist is doing somewhere else," he said. O'Hara repeated that the United States has labeled the cartoons "offensive."

Correspondents Kevin Sullivan in Copenhagen and Ellen Nakashima in Jakarta, Indonesia, and special correspondents Kamran Khan in Karachi, Pakistan, and Javed Hamdard in Kabul contributed to this report.

A Startling New Lesson in the Power of Imagery

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

They're callous and feeble cartoons, cooked up as a provocation by a conservative newspaper exploiting the general Muslim prohibition on images of the Prophet Muhammad to score cheap points about freedom of expression.

But drawings are drawings, so a question arises. Have any modern works of art provoked as much chaos and violence as the Danish caricatures that first ran in September in the newspaper Jyllands-Posten?

The story goes back a bit further, to a Danish children's author looking to write a book about the life of Muhammad, in the spirit of religious tolerance, and finding no illustrator because all the artists he approached said they were afraid. In response, the newspaper commissioned these cartoons, a dozen of them, by various satirists. And like all pictures calculated to be noticed by offending somebody, the caricaturist's stock in trade and the oldest trick in the book of modern art, they would have disappeared into deserved oblivion had not their targets risen to the bait.

The newspaper was banking on the fact that unlike the West — where Max Ernst's painting of Mary spanking the infant Jesus didn't raise an eyebrow when recently shown at the Metropolitan Museum — the Muslim world has no tradition of, or tolerance for, religious irony in its art.

But there are precedents going all the way back to the Bible for virulent reactions to proscribed and despised images. Beginning with the ancient Egyptians, who lopped off the noses of statues of dead pharaohs, through the toppling of statues of Lenin and Saddam Hussein, violence has often been directed against offending objects, though rarely against the artists who made them.

Educated secular Westerners reared on modernism, with its inclination toward abstraction, its gamesmanship and its knee-jerk baiting of traditional authority, can miss the real force behind certain visual images, particularly religious ones. Trained to see pictures formally, as designs or concepts, we can often overlook the way images may not just symbolize but actually "partake of what they represent," as the art historian David Freedberg has put it.

That's certainly how many aggrieved Muslims perceived the cartoons. Circulating the pictures, they prompted Arab governments like those of Saudi Arabia and Syria, not otherwise champions of religious freedom, to support boycotts of Danish goods and to withdraw their ambassadors from Copenhagen. That in turn led European papers to republish the cartoons in solidarity with Jyllands-Posten and in defense of free speech.

Some of them have been reprinted in Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Hungary, New Zealand, Ukraine and Jordan. One appeared in The Philadelphia Inquirer. They've spread worldwide via the Web, exacerbating Muslim outrage while leading many nonbelieving non-Muslims to scratch their heads over how such banal and idiotic pictures could ever be given a thought in the first place. Muhammad is lampooned with a turban in the shape of a ticking bomb; he's at the gates of heaven, arms raised, saying to men who look like suicide bombers, "Stop, stop, we have run out of virgins."

Irate Muslim protesters set fire to the Danish and Norwegian missions in Damascus, where Syrian newspapers routinely print the most appalling, racist cartoons of big-nosed Jews. In Beirut, rioters burned the Danish mission and vandalized a Maronite Catholic church, beating a Dutch news photographer mistaken for a Dane.

On Monday, Afghan security forces killed several protesters who tried to storm the American air base at Bagram. Yesterday the leading Iranian daily announced a contest for the best cartoon about the Holocaust, and 200 members of Iran's 290-member Parliament condemned the Danish cartoons: "Apparently, they have not learned their lesson from the miserable author of 'The Satanic Verses,' " the members said in a statement, referring to the fatwah against Salman Rushdie. From Gaza to Auckland, imams have demanded execution or amputations for the cartoonists and their publishers.

Over art? These are made-up pictures. The photographs from Abu Ghraib were documents of real events, but they didn't provoke such widespread violence. What's going on?

In part, the new Molotov cocktail of technology and incendiary art has hastened the speed with which otherwise forgettable pictures are now globally transmitted. Cellphones help protesters rally mobs swiftly against them.

And there is also the deepening cynicism and political hypocrisy now endemic in the culture wars. Last week a State Department spokesman, Sean McCormack, simultaneously condemned the cartoons as "unacceptable" and spoke up for free speech, while the Joint Chiefs of Staff were firing off a letter to The Washington Post about a cartoon it ran in which Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, in the guise of a doctor, says to a heavily bandaged soldier who has lost his arms and legs, "I'm listing your condition as 'battle hardened.' " The letter called the cartoon, by Tom Toles, "reprehensible" and offensive to soldiers.

The Post's editorial page editor, Fred Hiatt, replied that the newspaper would not censor its cartoonists, inspiring John Aravosis, who runs Americablog (americablog.blogspot.com), the Web site where the letter was first reported, to tell Editor & Publisher magazine: "Now that the Joint Chiefs have addressed the insidious threat cartoons pose to our troops, perhaps they can move on to the less pressing issues like getting them their damn body armor."

As is so often the case in the culture wars, choosing sides can be exasperating. Modern artists and their promoters forever pander to a like-minded audience by goading obvious targets, hoping to incite reactions that pass for political point-scoring. The twist in the Danish case is only that a conservative paper provoked Muslims. One may be excused for wondering whether the silence of the art world has something to do with the discomfort of staking a position where neither party offers the sanctuary of political correctness.

An obvious precedent, now comically tame by comparison, is the "Sensation" show at the Brooklyn Museum in 1999, a promotional bonanza for the British collector and wheeler-dealer Charles Saatchi, who owned the art in the show. The exhibition incited protests by the Catholic League. Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani played the stern dad to a bunch of publicity-savvy artists whose work included a collage of the Virgin Mary with cutouts from pornographic magazines and shellacked clumps of elephant dung.

Previously unmoved to action by Catholic League protests against a play at City Center involving a gay lead character fashioned after Jesus, the mayor, contemplating a Senate race against Hillary Rodham Clinton, decided he was personally offended by the art, although he had never actually seen it, and threatened to cut off public financing for the museum.

"You don't have a right to government subsidy for desecrating somebody else's religion," he said, foreshadowing a bit the Danish debacle about freedom of religious expression, notwithstanding that the artist of the Virgin Mary, Chris Ofili, happened to be Roman Catholic.

The New York art world was shocked only because it had expected the show to pass without fuss, since the art was already old news to insiders. But then museums nationwide had to hold their collective nose to defend Brooklyn over the issue of free expression, and by the end the whole affair had turned into farce, obscuring even the quality of what were, in fact, a few not-so-bad works of art.

No protester torched the museum or called for beheading anybody. Farce now becomes calamity over the cartoons, a different matter. The current bloodshed, fueled by political extremists and religious fanatics, turns the culture war once again into real war. People forget that Salman Rushdie's Japanese and Italian translators were stabbed (the Japanese fatally) and his Norwegian publisher shot.

What may be overlooked this time is a deep, abiding fact about visual art, its totemic power: the power of representation. This power transcends logic or aesthetics. Like words, it can cause genuine pain.

Ancient Greeks used to chain statues to prevent them from fleeing. Buddhists in Ceylon once believed that a painting could be brought to life once its eyes were painted. In the Netherlands in the 1560's, pictures were smashed in nearly every town and village simply for being graven images. And in the Philippines, enraged citizens destroyed billboards of Ferdinand Marcos.

To many people, pictures will always, mysteriously, embody the things they depict. Among the issues to be hashed out in this affair, there's a lesson to be gleaned about art: Even a dumb cartoon may not be so dumb if it calls out to someone.

New Abu Ghraib images broadcast
Abuse footage
An Australian TV channel has broadcast previously unpublished images showing apparent US abuse of prisoners in Iraq's Abu Ghraib jail in 2003.
The images on SBS TV are thought to be from the same source as those that caused an outcry around the world and led to several US troops being jailed.

The new images show "homicide, torture and sexual humiliation", SBS said.

They are part of a court case in the US. A judge has ruled they can be published but the case is continuing.

The broadcast of the images comes at a time of increased tension between Muslim nations and the West over cartoons satirising the Prophet Muhammad.

'Live rounds'

One of the videos broadcast on the SBS programme Dateline on Wednesday appears to show prisoners being forced to masturbate to the camera.

Other video footage appears to show a prisoner hitting his head against a wall.

The channel said he was a mentally disturbed patient who became a plaything of guards who practised ways of restraining him.

Some photos are said to show corpses. There are also images of prisoners with body and head wounds.

Some of the pictures have now been re-broadcast on US networks and on Arab satellite channel al-Arabiya.

SBS journalist Olivia Rousset told the BBC one of them showed a senior Iraqi officer being treated for a throat wound received after he resisted being transferred within the camp.

Some of the new photos showed soldiers who have already been convicted for their part in the abuse, including Lynndie England and Charles Graner, the man prosecutors said was the ringleader in the scandal.

A number are versions of the photographs that caused outrage when they were initially leaked in April 2004, including the prisoner wearing a hood and hooked to wires.

SBS also said it had received reports that some prisoners were killed when US soldiers ran out of rubber bullets during a prison riot and started using live rounds instead.

Convicted

A spokesman for the US defence department told the BBC News website: "The abuses that occurred were tragic and damaged our country's image.

ABU GHRAIB SCANDAL TIMELINE
28 Apr 04: CBS shows images from 2003 of inmates being subjected to abuses by US soldiers
30 Apr 04: Six US soldiers are charged. Three more are charged later.
6 May 04: President Bush apologises for abuse
19 May 04: First soldier to be court-martialled in this case is sentenced to jail. More convictions will follow
21 Jul 05: Government files court papers to try to stop more images of abuse being made public
29 Sept 05: Judge rules 87 unseen pictures of Iraqi inmates abused by US troops should be released
15 Feb 06: Australia's SBS TV broadcasts previously unpublished images

"However, the images portrayed were not part of a legal, authorised interrogation process, but were taken as part of isolated, unauthorised incidents."

He said none of the 12 major reviews since the Abu Ghraib scandal broke had shown the department had sanctioned or encouraged abuse.

Analysts say the reaction in the Muslim world may depend on how widely the images are shown. In Iraq, the emergence of the images come amid tension caused by the release of a video appearing to show UK troops beating Iraqi civilians.

The BBC's Jon Brain in Baghdad says al-Arabiya is broadcasting half a dozen of the new Abu Ghraib images, though it has refrained from showing the most shocking.

The images are part of a group of more than 100 photographs and four videos taken at Abu Ghraib and later handed to the US army's Criminal Investigations Division.

In September a New York judge ruled in favour of a request from the American Civil Liberties Union for the pictures to be released.

The judge rejected the government's arguments that publication could fuel anti-US feelings. The Dateline programme says the government is appealing against the decision.

US President George W Bush has said the Abu Ghraib abuse was a "disgrace".

Nine junior soldiers have been convicted - some are serving jail sentences. All senior US commanders were cleared except the commander in charge of Abu Ghraib at the time, Janis Karpinski, who was reduced in rank from general to colonel.

Story from BBC NEWS: